Brad Stone: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's an unbelievable chapter. Even if you feel like I know a lot of these stories, I'm not going read it. Go buy the book and read chapter 13. It’s such a crazy story completely on its own. Do I have it right that his phone via WhatsApp was hacked by Mohammed bin Salman, and that was very likely exfiltrating data, but that has nothing to do with how the public found out about the affair? The second part is right, it had nothing to do with the National Enquirer story, which supplied the evidence filed in the voluminous court cases. Amply showed, the evidence was supplied by the brother. I would say that there's just ambiguity around whether the Saudis hacked his phone. There was a study done by a consulting company that Bezos hired as a private investigator. There's a lot of skepticism in the cybersecurity community about that study and what they found. I don't know and I don't know that we'll ever know. What's unfortunate is that the Saudi bots on Twitter have kind of taken what I wrote in that book to launch another wave of attacks against Bezos saying that he improperly accused them. The interesting thing is that there is obviously real enmity from the Saudi government, the Crown Prince, and their agents against the Washington Post and against Jeff Bezos. That is unequivocally true. The question of whether they employed Pegasus software and hacked his phone. It's also true, by the way, that NBS was sending very curious texts. That was suspicious.…

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